Eurocentric Anti-Eurocentrism (repost)

THE QUESTION OF “Eurocentrism” is a vexing problem not only for academia but for the left. In the broadest sense, Eurocentrism can be understood as the implicit view that societies and cultures of European origin constitute the “natural” norm for assessing what goes on in the rest of the world.

One Response to "Eurocentric Anti-Eurocentrism (repost)"

I have a serious problem with this post of Wood’s, and have had so ever since it was written. While her main point is correct, it is put forward in a dishonest manner that those who have been involved in the transition debate. For one thing, she mischaracterizes Blaut and conflates his overall analysis with the kind of juvenile “eurocentric anti-eurocentrism” she spends most of her time critiquing; for another she ignores completely the actual criticisms that were made about Political Marxism’s eurocentrism from the anti-Eurocentric Marxist camp, or those Marxist political economists working in third world regions that have a different conception of transition.

Blaut attacked the Brenner thesis as being eurocentric (see his *Eight Eurocentric Historians*) and on the whole he is correct; in fact Wood ignores what the main thrust of his argument so as to straw-person the charge made against her school of thought, which actually is quite racist. For Wood, European colonialism had nothing to do with why capitalism developed in Western Europe – it was simply a quirk contributing *nothing* to the enclosure of the commons. In the past she, Brenner, and others went out of their way to dismiss Eric Williams’ work on *Capitalism and Slavery*, just as they ignore the work of Samir Amin and instead focused their critiques on Baran and Sweezy so as to avoid the big elephant in the room: maybe capitalism developed in Europe partly because of European colonialism. The main critics of Woods’ “eurocentrism” were not at all the people who she calls “anti-eurocentric eurocentrists” but in fact people who do agree that capitalism has a European specificity but that this specificity is also because of its colonial project. So in this context, just when I first read this article, I saw it as little more than cover for what is indeed some deeply troubling eurocentrism in the Political Marxist tradition.